Articles Tagged: TiVo

This week, Kirk tells Tim & Jim his story about losing his power due to last week’s hurricane-force winds in SoCal, and how he hopped in his jeep and toured the devastation in Pasadena while searching for coffee and the internet. (6:00 – 13:28)

Then, Albert Puljos is going to Disneyland! We take a look at whether or not this is a good deal for the Angels, and have a heated discussion about whether it makes any difference that he didn’t stay with the Cardinals. (14:05 – 23:04)

Can you believe that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are going to be inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Jim can’t. (23:06 – 30:20)

Finally, Tim shares what’s in his mix: The Roots, Kate Bush and The Smashing Pumpkins, which leads to a discussion about the eternal awesomeness of Siamese Dream as well as well as stories about seeing the Pumpkins at Lollapalooza & the Reading Festival. (30:21 – 40:55)

Whether or not the huge popularity of Netflix Instant is making a dent in video piracy, and why Hollywood continues to drive people to, er, other methods of getting content, despite evidence that people want to pay for stuff.

Why fewer and fewer people are using browsers to access the internet, as Kirk & Tim have seen their digital lives reconfigure with the advent of the iPad.

And finally, we induct our very first album into the Medialoper Great Albums Hall of Fame — R.E.M. – Murmur. Of course. What else could it be?

When we talk about “convergence” here at Loper HQ, what we aren’t talking about is getting our internet, cable and phone from the same evil multinational corporation.

Instead, we mean devices that combine several formerly disparate functions into a single, easy-to-use interface. Like, of course, the iPhone, which Tim Gaskill declared this weekend to be the greatest thing ever made.

While the iPhone is most certainly a major step in portable convergence, there hasn’t yet been a device in the home video space that allows me to watch a combination of internet video and recorded TV with a single, easy-to-use interface.

You know, the One Box.

One Box to rule them all
One Box to find them
One Box to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them

“NOOOOOO!!!!” I screamed into the phone, loud enough that the poor Third Customer Service Rep from The Cable Company probably didn’t need his phone to hear it in Bangalore. But it was nearing 10:30 Saturday morning and I’d just been on anger-building hold for 20 minutes (“Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received”).

“I WILL NOT RESCHEDULE MY APPOINTMENT!!! THIS IS YOURRRRR ISSUE!! YOU NEED TO FIX IT!!” Technically, it really wasn’t the Third Customer Service Rep’s issue, it’s just that he got stuck with me just as my asshole-o-meter had gone to 11. I was trembling with righteous fury, storming around my apartment with the cell phone jammed in my ear. I was as angry as I have ever been, and that’s really saying something.

When I made the decision to be a DVR early adopter, I chose Replay-TV over TiVo. It’s just that I thought that the Replay was slightly better for the money. It wasn’t a Mac vs. PC decision: I wasn’t taking sides in some great cultural war or anything. At the time, if you said that you were getting a DVR, people had no idea what you were talking about, anyways.

Meanwhile, a lot of other people got TiVo, and fell in love with its easy-to-use interface, and its iconic boo-bop noise, so it became the verb, even while teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I bought a second Replay — the one with the infamous commercial skip — just a couple of years prior to the company being sold, and being sold again. Now, it’s essentially a software company, and good luck to them — rarely does a technology change my life the way theirs did — but their PC Edition doesn’t fit what I need right now, what with my HD TV and everything.

What does fit, it looks like, is this new TiVo Series 3 with the HD. There is, however, a problem. There is always a problem.